Lean-to

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A lean-to is term used for two similar, yet different types of building.

It can be a free standing structure of three walls and a sloping roof. The open side is sheltered away from the prevailing winds and rains. Often a rough structure made of logs or unfinished wood and used as a camping shelter. It can also refer to a shed, abutting the wall of another structure, with three walls and a sloping roof.

Lean-to building is the name which one gives to certain wood constructions which are coupled against public buildings or private buildings, and whose roofs have only one gutter; the lean-to building is always provisional, it is an appendix with a turn-key building which one raises in consequence of a new need to satisfy, or which one lets build by tolerance. Still today, a great number of our public buildings, and particularly of our cathedrals, are surrounded of lean-to buildings raised against their bases, between their buttresses. These parasitic constructions become a cause of ruin for the monuments, and it is useful to make them disappear. Sometimes also they were high to cover external staircases, such is the lean-to building built in XVe century against one of the walls of the large chapter room of the cathedral of Meaux (1); to protect from the entries or to establish markets with cover around certain large civil buildings.
—Text translated from the (French) language Dictionary of French Architecture from 11th to 16th Century (1856)

[edit] Laavu

A Finnish laavu is also a lean-to, small building intended for temporary residence during hiking or fishing trips in the wilderness.

Laavus are commonly found in the Finnish Lapland near popular fishing rivers. In principle, a laavu is a simplified version of a wilderness hut. Like wilderness huts, laavus are unheated, and may not be reserved beforehand. Unlike wilderness huts, laavus lack doors or windows. A typical laavu is a wooden building, about 10 m² in area and 2 m high, consisting of a roof, floor, and three walls. The fourth wall is left permanently open.

A laavu is intended to only provide a safe place to sleep during fishing trips. Visitors are expected to bring their own sleeping bags, as there are no other sleeping facilities. Most laavus also have a place to hold a campfire in front of them.

A laavu can also be an improvised structure of the same fashion built out of available materials (branches with leaves or pine/fir needles intact or moss or pelts for the covering and sturdier stripped branches or young tree-trunks as the supporting structure) for temporary camp deep in the wilderness, even for a single overnight stay.